Techniques of analyzing conversations include a conversation analysis technique. The conversation analysis technique is utilized, for example, for analyzing data of phone conversations made in a section called call center or contact center. Hereinafter, the section specialized in dealing with phone calls from customers made for inquiries, complaints, and orders about merchandise or service will be referred to as contact center.
In many cases the voice of the customers directed to the contact center reflect the customers' needs and satisfaction level. Therefore, it is essential to extract the emotion and needs of the customer on the bases of phone conversations with the customers, in order to increase the number of repeating customers. The phone conversations from which it is desirable to extract the emotion and other factors of the speaker are not limited to those exchanged in the contact center.
According to a method proposed in Patent Literature (PTL) 1, store clerk utterance sections are identified from the voice of the phone conversation. Then an employee satisfaction level is calculated with respect to each of the store clerk utterance sections based on emotion recognition, and a general satisfaction level is calculated on the basis of the calculated employee satisfaction level. According to a method proposed in PTL 2, voice keywords are extracted from store clerk accosting sections through voice recognition with respect to data recorded while the store clerk is attending a customer. Then customer accosting sections are identified on the basis of collection timing associated with the voice keywords, and the emotion recognition is performed with respect to voice data of the identified customer accosting sections.